


In My Father's House Are Many Rooms

by oschun



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 06:12:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8360470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oschun/pseuds/oschun
Summary: A bookish crossover challenge with sylvanwitch and jdax2002 This started out as Sartre’s hell in his play No Exit where three very different characters find themselves together in a sealed room with no way out. It morphed into something else and is reliant on that old trope of memory loss, not!real worlds and dreamscapes. Inspired by Dream a Little Dream of Me and What Is and What Should Never Be. “Hell is other people” (Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit)





	

The room is familiar. Something about the smell. It smells of greasy takeout, body odor and transience. It hangs heavy and unashamed in the air like the previous occupants had purposefully left clues to their identity, knowing that nobody would care who’d been there before. Someone who likes extra pepperoni on their pizza. The smell of old sex, a grandfather’s aftershave and the cheap exoticism of some girl’s perfume. 

It reminds him of something, some other room. 

_A boy with floppy brown hair holds on to a man who looks like he must be the boy’s father, something around the eyes. The father is trying to disentangle himself from desperate, spindly limbs and escape through the door. Another boy, a little older than the first, sits on the bed ignoring the father’s pleading look over the small, ruffled head hidden in his midriff._

The smell of people just passing through, a patchwork life without narrative thread. 

He shakes himself free of the image in his head and looks around. 

The décor is exaggerated: forest-motif wallpaper, the greens bright and unnatural, trees crowding in on a carpet of muddy brown; twinned singles to the right; a scuffed round table is centre left, bordered by three chairs. A lopsided dresser with its cracked mirror sags against the wall in front of him, his reflection split into mismatched images: a bewildered expression, jeans, muddy boots. 

He steps closer, trying to get a proper look at the face. Something’s wrong. His head feels empty, as if there’s a hollow space at the centre of his consciousness. He doesn’t know where he is, who he is. There are half-glimpsed fragments at the edges of his memory like doors standing ajar off a long, empty corridor - but he can’t make them out clearly.

The cracked reflection reveals that he is good-looking so he smirks at himself. It seems like a stupid thing to do in the empty room so he stops. 

He notices that a section of the broken mirror to his right reflects the closed door behind him. There’s no doorknob. He feels no immediate concern. It’s the kind of room that doesn’t need an exit. That makes a momentary sort of sense to him.

Always look for an escape route. He remembers the instruction from somewhere way back in his memory. He takes in the windowless walls, turns around and crouches in front of the door to consider the lock mechanism. It should be easy enough to jimmy open. He searches his pockets for a makeshift pick. They’re empty. The room doesn’t offer up any other lock-picking solutions. 

He’s not quite sure what to do next.

He starts pacing the room. Fifteen paces by eight. Fifteen by eight. Fifteen by eight. 

That becomes boring so he sits down on the edge of one of the beds, sighs, and falls back to consider the blank canvas of the ceiling. His eyelids grow heavy and tired of staring at the dirty-white emptiness above him.

He dreams of the father and two sons. 

_They’re at the coast, some place up north that gets heavy tourist traffic during the summer, but it’s late autumn now and cold with blustering high winds. They’re eating crabs out of their shells at an outside table, surrounded by the pale green light that filters through a plastic awning covering a balcony over the cold ocean, empty besides their laughter and sucking of salty shells._

_The cook, who longs for the wet heat and deep-fried shellfish of his hometown in Louisiana, looks at them through a salt-encrusted window and shakes his head. He knows they’re just passing through, moving south like migratory birds, can see it in the leftover sun-kiss on their skins, and wonders again if he loves his fisherman enough to stay on this god-forsaken strip of land that the sea should have claimed for its own a long time ago._

_They look happy, though. The father and his two sons. Happier than the sun-burnt, squabbling families of summer. He’s probably a divorced dad who doesn’t get to spend enough time with his boys. Moments like these are precious for tenuous family links like theirs. The cook sends out his favorite dessert on the house._

_Like a ghost, he stands off to the side of the scene playing out in front of him, draws a deep breath of sea air and shivers in the biting wind. He watches the cook watching the father and his two sons and feels the enormity of the distances between people. He sees the father pull the youngest son on to his lap. Even in moments of closeness, they’re still alone._

He wakes up to broad shoulders hunched over the table. Something stirs hot and familiar and low down in his body. 

He crosses the room, stands next to the table until the shaggy head lifts. Brown eyes meet his. “Dean?”

The name fits. The doors at the edges of his memory open a little wider. He can hear that name in a myriad of tones: “Dean!” an irritated explosion of breath; “Dean,” a long sigh of a word whispered in his ear in the darkness; and this tone, questioning and looking for reassurance, he knows that sound of his name too. 

“Yeah, Sam.” He’s so busy looking at the face beneath him, he doesn’t even notice how easily this man’s name slips from his mouth.

Sam drops his head like he’s considering his name in the plasticized brown whorls of the scuffed table. Dean stands next to him, arms heavy with clumsiness and waiting. Eventually, Sam grins as if something has connected, puzzle pieces fitting together, and stands to pull Dean close to him. 

The hug feels vaguely embarrassing so Dean pushes him away. Sam smiles again like it’s a game he’s remembered them playing before and punches Dean lightly on the shoulder. Despite the thick soup in his head and the erratic rhythm in his chest, Dean smiles back and mirrors the punch on Sam’s shoulder. They stand there grinning at each other until they both feel ridiculous and sit down at the table, staring at cross-angles from each other.

“I’m your brother.” 

Dean looks at Sam’s profile and thinks, No, that’s not what you are. You’re… He can’t quite put it into words.

Sam looks at him sideways, runs slow, suggestive eyes down the right angle of Dean’s body in the chair. He smirks like he knows what Dean is thinking.

“Yeah, you must be my pain-in-the-ass little brother. I remember you.” Dean attempts to counter the smirk.

Sam’s grin widens like he’s worked something out that Dean has yet to fathom. “Yeah, Dean, I remember you too.” There’s something hot and strange underlying his words that Dean doesn’t want to think too hard about. 

In an attempt to regain the conversational upper hand, Dean pointedly tells Sam that there are no exits to the room, like he’s defaulted on some sort of responsibility.

Sam’s grin doesn’t falter. He dutifully glances around the windowless room. His eyes switch back towards Dean from the blank, flat expanse of the door with a wry expression. It was the first thing Sam had noticed, Dean realizes. It had taken him longer to see clear of the fog in his head. He feels petty.

He gets up and starts pacing the room again, trying to ignore the expression on Sam’s face. Sam seems to have come to some sort of realization that eludes him. 

“You know why we’re here!” he accuses, turning around suddenly. 

A frown draws Sam’s eyebrows together. He looks around the room in confusion like he’s forgotten where here is. Dean feels a moment of panic. He grabs Sam by the shirt, hauls him to his feet and shouts in his face, “Who the hell are you? Where are we?”

Sam grips his biceps. “Dean, calm down. I don’t know where we are. But I think it’s really important that we don’t lose it. Not here. And you know who I am.”

Dean can’t push down the claustrophobic panic erupting inside him. He shoves Sam back into the chair and strides over to the door. The first kick reverberates with a satisfyingly loud sound through the room, but there’s no damage done to the door. He tries again and again until pain pulses up his leg. His shoulder makes even less impact. Eventually, he slams his fist hard into wooden impassivity, wanting to at least feel the damage in his hand if he can’t break down the door.

“Dean, for god’s sake, just stop!” He’s pulled back against a broad chest, large hands firm on his shoulders.

Dean looks down at his clenched fist. It hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but his knuckles still protrude in perfect round hills through unmarked skin. A punch that hard should’ve broken something. 

He shrugs Sam’s hands off his shoulders and goes back to pacing, trying to make sense of things. Sam sits down again and watches him. “You’re going to wear a hole in the carpet.”

Dean thinks of animals running round and round well-worn circles in their too-small enclosures at the zoo. He needs something and Sam is purposefully keeping it from him. “Fuck off,” he growls. Sam raises his eyebrows in surprise.

Dean doesn’t apologize, continues pacing and counting numbers in his head. It takes him a few minutes to notice that the numbers are diminishing. Seven and a half paces to the mid-way point of the room become six short steps; the three neat half-steps each way on the horizontal line turn into a clumsy, surprised stumble. Fifteen by eight is reduced to fourteen by seven, then thirteen by six. He’s making the room smaller. There’s a blurriness at the edges of the room where the walls meet the floor. 

He stops, glares at Sam like it’s his fault and collapses on the bed. “Fuck! I’m in hell!”

Sam appears at the end of the bed, looming above him. He wears a concerned expression that starts to slip into something else as he looks down at Dean. The edges of everything are so hazy, but that face is so clear and familiar, that exact combination of features has been branded into Dean’s memory. Right now, a dark and hungry look rides his brother’s face. It makes Dean feel hot and uncomfortable and, if he’s honest, a bit scared. If this is his brother, he shouldn’t be looking at him like that. 

Dean drops his eyes, runs them down the buttons on Sam’s shirt, and like he’s thought it into being, Sam starts to slip the round plastic discs out of their cotton eye-holes. Sam shrugs his shirt off his shoulders and with hooded eyes starts to unbuckle his belt. Dean closes his eyes, a cold weight freezing his ribcage tight around his thudding heart.

Eyes still closed, he feels the heated planes of Sam’s naked frame fit against his body. Instinctively, he spreads his legs and their hips slot together. Every inch of his body affirms that this is what he’s wanted since he’d woken to see that familiar form hunched over the table. He can feel Sam’s erection pushing against him and stifles the groan trying to force its way out of his throat. 

He opens his eyes to Sam’s face above him. Dean expects to see at least a hint of the fear and confusion that he’s feeling mirrored on his brother’s face. Instead, there’s only love, naked desire and the remnants of an affectionate smirk. 

Sam lowers his head and breathes Dean’s name into his ear. Dean shivers from the heat of it, the word travelling down the spiral of his ear, making its way through his body and turning his blood to molten metal, hot and heavy. 

“You do know me, Dean. And I know that you remember this.” Sam turns his head and presses his lips to Dean’s. Sighing, Dean opens his mouth and Sam licks his way in, his tongue hot and insistent. Dean finally lets go of the groan deep in his throat and bites down with sharp teeth into the softness of his brother’s lower lip. Sam grunts in pain and pulls back, his eyes burning.

Dean feels something shake loose inside him. The bolts that keep his control in place are undone. He grips the back of Sam’s neck, twists his fingers in too-long hair and forcefully pulls Sam’s head back down, kisses his brother hard, his tongue and teeth unrelenting. 

Sam meets him halfway, giving as good as he gets. His mouth is desperate and his hands savagely clench bruises into Dean’s flesh. Their hips shove roughly together.

Dean comes before Sam can even undo the top button of his jeans. Sam snorts with laughter against the flushed skin of Dean’s neck, his hand stilling between Dean’s legs. Dean shoves Sam on his back and jerks him off hard and fast so that he comes, moaning and body shaking, almost as quickly as Dean had.

Sam starts laughing again as soon as he’s caught his breath. He turns over, propping himself up on an elbow to look down at Dean. “I’ve missed you, too,” he grins.

Dean doesn’t know how he knows that he feels the same way, but he does. 

Sam leans forward and kisses him. He pulls back and his face lights with mischief, “Dean, seriously, stop thinking so hard. I know you, and it’s not your usual M.O. You look like you’re about to burst a blood vessel. If you haven’t already.”

Something slots into place. Dean knows this. “Fuck you, Sammy.”

Sam rolls his eyes in an expression of Is that all you’ve got? Dean feels a little sheepish, but then he forgives himself. He’s only just starting to remember who he is. He can’t be expected to make wisecracks when he still has no idea what’s going on around him, can he?

Sam takes pity on him and leans down to kiss him again. He wraps his body around Dean’s. “Sleepy,” he mumbles. 

Dean holds himself stiffly in the warm embrace of Sam’s arms. “I don’t think I like getting this close.” He’s aware of how absurd that sounds.

Sam breathes into his neck. “Believe me, Dean. I know you. You love being close.” 

Dean doesn’t believe him but allows Sam to fall asleep before he gets up and climbs into the other bed. The sheets are cool and he stretches out, freed of the constraint of Sam’s long, heavy limbs.

Dean has a nightmare. It’s a familiar horror from his childhood. 

The basement is big, dark, dank and locked tight. His throat is raw from shouting, his knuckles raw from hitting the unflinching wood of the trap door. He’s not wearing any clothes and it’s very cold. Footsteps creak on the floorboards above him and something scuttles in the darkness near him.

He wakes up in darkness black as pitch, eyes flicking open and heart beating fast.

“Dean?” he hears Sam’s gentle, concerned voice from the other bed. 

“Yeah,” he croaks, then gets his voice under control and asks, “You okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, Sam.”

“Want to come over here?”

“Why? Do you want me to?”

Sam sighs. Dean hears the creak of bedsprings and then Sam is a pair of warm arms wrapped around him. “Yeah, Dean, I want you to.” 

Sam is asleep almost instantly.

The tiredness and the darkness are unnatural. Dean knows that. He tries half-heartedly to struggle against the waves of treacle pulling him under, but the sweet, dark allure of dreams is hard to resist. He surrenders. 

Two boys lie in the dark on a mattress on the floor. They’re brothers. They comfort each other after their father has come home, drunk and angry, with the blood of another boy’s father on his hands. Sometimes men are transformed into monsters through no fault of their own. Dark forces work against them and they become dangerous to the people who love them. 

The older brother allows the younger to settle close behind him as he turns on his side to go to sleep. They’re too old to be sleeping together, too old to be scared of the dark but they know things other boys don’t. They know that grown-ups lie when they say that everything’s going to be okay. They know that grown-ups are as afraid as they are.

The brothers are not afraid when they’re like this. 

When the younger boy’s breathing starts to hitch and he tightens his hand on his brother’s hip, they’re not afraid. They know that they’re meant to be scared of hands wandering over warm skin, bodies rubbing against each other, but they’re not. Not now. 

Dean wakes with a start, thinking that someone is standing at the foot of the bed looking down at them. But no-one’s there. 

The room seems different. Despite the absence of windows, it’s filled with the grey, dispersed light of dawn. There’s a cool, damp and woody smell in the air. The wallpapered trees seem to have separated from each other. They’re no longer flat on the wall; some have moved further away, others lean a little closer. He reaches out, the length of his arm just managing to stretch the distance between the bed and the wall and trails the tips of his fingers over its cool, flat surface. It must be his imagination that his fingers come back to him smelling of moss and pine. 

When he rolls over, a man stands at the foot of the bed looking down at them. 

There are shadows on the man’s face: there’s the one that darkens his jaw; some bruise the thin skin under his eyes, others cloud deeper in his eyes. He looks unhappy. No, that’s too light and frivolous a word for his expression. He looks tortured.

The sudden motion of Dean sitting up in bed wakens Sam. He blinks sleepily at Dean, follows his brother’s eyes and gasps when he sees who is standing above them. 

The man turns his back on them, walks to the table and leans over it, his hands clenched around its edges. It’s as if he carries a burden too heavy for his broad shoulders and needs to hold on to something to keep himself upright.

“Dad?” Sam asks the back turned to them. The word had already formed in Dean’s mind before Sam uttered it. There’s no response except for a slight stiffening of the man’s shoulders. 

They get out of bed, moving quickly, scrabbling for their clothes and not meeting each other’s eyes.

Their father doesn’t move from his position as they warily stand in front of him, the table a barrier between him and them. He lifts his head to look at them from under heavy eyebrows, his glance switching between them. Nobody says anything. Eventually, he slumps into a chair with a sigh. They sit down opposite him in a mirrored movement. Dean can feel Sam’s burning sidelong glances but focuses on the broken-looking man in front of him.

“Is this another test? Haven’t I done enough?”

Nothing in this room has made any sense, but hearing that tone in his father’s gruff voice is something else. It breaks natural laws. Dean leans across the table. He wants to take his father’s clenched fists into his but they’re pulled away before he can. He’s almost glad of it. 

“Why are you here?”

He knows to feel shame at answering this man in anything other than certainties. “We don’t know.” He looks to Sam for confirmation and is surprised by the cold look on his brother’s face. He’s leaning back in his chair, looking surly and younger somehow, almost boyish.

“We don’t know,” Dean repeats himself. “There are no exits.” He starts to sound like he’s going to give a status report and knows that Sam is smirking next to him, possibly rolling his eyes. Dean has a feeling that he’s very familiar with that particular expression. 

“We’ve tried to get out, Dad, we have.” Dean can’t help sounding like a kid. When Sam snorts aloud, he kicks the front legs of his brother’s chair forward and skids him into the table, his middle meeting the edge and knocking the wind from him.

Dean ignores the hissed Asshole from next to him. He’s focussed on his father. “Dad, do you know how to get out of here?”

John ignores him. He’s looking at Sam. “What were you boys doing in the same bed? There are two beds,” he quietly challenges his youngest son. 

Dean’s stomach drops. He wants to say something, to answer the question before Sam is able to, but can only watch helplessly for Sam’s response. It’s like he has ceased to exist and only his father and brother sit at the table, tension shimmering between them. 

“What do you think we were doing, Dad? You know. You’ve always known.” The challenge is met. 

Dean feels like he’s watching Sam becoming someone else, his edges becoming harder and jagged, like he’s adopting a different role in a drama that’s been played out before. A sick feeling twists through his gut. They should be thinking of ways to get out of the room, not doing this to each other.

“Yes. I’ve always known.” 

Dean’s head snaps back towards his father. He wasn’t expecting that. 

“Is that why you’re here? Are you here to torture me with it?” John continues, resignation in his voice.

“It’s not always about you, Dad.” Sam’s words are like ice, hard and unsympathetic.

Anger flares red across John’s cheeks. “No, it isn’t,” he sneers. “It’s about you, Sammy. You never grew out of thinking that other people only exist to take care of you, to make you happy. You’ve never been willing to make sacrifices.” 

Sick, cold fear spreads like a disease through Dean’s body. He knows that he has never heard his father sound like that, like he’s been frayed to nothing, scraped out and empty. He’s overwhelmed by a sense of imminent danger, like they’re heading for a car wreck, and there’s no escaping it.

Something small and hurt flickers in Sam’s eyes before he clenches his jaw, his lips thinning into an answering sneer. “Sacrifice?” he jeers. “No, Dad, you’re right. It’s hard to follow in your footsteps. You own the idea of sacrifice. Nobody can give up as much as you have. You’ve given up everything for Mom, for Dean, for strangers you’ll never meet again. And you’ve always been so goddamn stoical about it.”

Dean becomes aware of movement out the corner of his eye. The paper trees are gathering closer, enclosing them in their anger. Twisted faces appear in the tree trunks and peer out from behind branches. He turns and grabs Sam by his collar, pulls him forward and tries to whisper, “Sam, don’t. Not here.” But his brother is vibrating with anger and refuses to heed to the warning.

“Fuck off, Dean. Why do you always do that? Stop defending him.”

Dean grabs hold of Sam’s shoulders, tries to centre him, make him return to himself. He wants to say something that doesn’t include you’re making the wallpaper angry but it’s hard not to.

Sam struggles in Dean’s grip. “Sam!” Dean tries again, pulling his brother close and whispering into his ear, “This is not about you. Stop being angry. Look around you.” 

Sam looks at Dean, looks at the walls, and stills. “Shit.” It’s a hissed realisation. 

“Yeah,” Dean responds.

When Sam leans forward to kiss Dean briefly like he’s doing it to fortify himself, John kicks the table across the room. It hits the opposite wall, shatters and then reforms to lie in a sad heap. They stand next to each other, trying not to be afraid of the man who fathered them. Dean feels Sam shudder next to him, like he’s remembering something that doesn’t just belong to this time and place.

It gets hot, really hot, really quickly. The trees start to lift and bubble against the heat of the walls.

John picks up a chair and throws it across the room. It bounces off the wall and lands crookedly on its legs. Sam and Dean flinch from the violence of it. They steel themselves, awaiting the approaching thunderstorm.

It doesn’t come. 

“They never break,” John says tiredly, looking at his sons standing shoulder-to-shoulder against him. He doesn’t even look angry anymore. The resignation in his voice is both less and more frightening than his earlier fury. The forest settles smugly back in place on the wall.

“No,” Dean agrees quietly. “It’s worth trying, though.”

John smiles. It’s a small, crooked twisting of his lips but there’s humor in it. “Yeah, Dean, it’s worth trying.” A moment of sympathy flashes between them before John looks back at Sam and says with a sigh, “I don’t understand you.”

“No, you don’t,” Sam agrees. He’s still vibrating with emotion and Dean shoulders him a little to prevent him from saying anything else.

“You have a lot of your mother in you,” John replies. Dean has to shoulder Sam again to keep him quiet. 

“She had secrets.” 

Dean starts at that. 

“She knew how to keep them, too,” John continues, rubbing his hand tiredly across his face. “Sometimes I think that her priorities were wrong, that she didn’t get the bigger picture. You can’t turn your back on your responsibilities or pretend that things aren’t real, just because you don’t want them to be.” He sighs deeply. “I guess she believed in something else.” He pauses like he’s trying to verbalize something that he doesn’t completely understand. “I think she believed that love was the most important thing. Maybe that’s a weakness.” 

Dean meets Sam’s confused glance. John’s words are cryptic, hinting at something neither of them recognizes. Dean feels a tug at his memory but it’s too vague to grasp hold of. He’s not entirely sure that their father is speaking directly to him and Sam. He looks like he’s somewhere else.

John suddenly looks intently at Dean. “Some sacrifices are worth making for someone you love.” Something about his father’s expression immediately conjures up the antiseptic smell of hospitals and flames burning red against a black night. There’s something else behind that, though, something hidden behind a thick veil, something too awful to consider. Pain and screaming and an all-consuming fire. He turns his mind away from the horror of it.

“But not at the cost of doing what’s right,” John emphasizes the word, so sure of his understanding of it. 

It’s the tone of voice that used to make Dean feel secure in a world where things are black and white, made safe by his father’s unambiguous interpretation of how things are, how they’re meant to be. He doesn’t know why, but for some reason it doesn’t have the same effect right now. He feels sad and a little lonely in his understanding of what it is to be a man who has outgrown the security of childhood. 

John looks at the two of them, his glance switching between them. “It’s not right,” he says.

The trees edge a little closer, a sense of anticipation starting to heat the room once more.

The temperature goes up a notch when Sam responds, “You don’t get to own that word, Dad. You can have sacrifice. Hell, you deserve it. But you don’t get to tell us what’s right anymore.” 

Dean sighs at Sam’s returning anger. He feels like a hamster on a wheel and there’s no way to get off. They’re doomed to walk in circles, lost in a forest that keeps leading them back to their starting position. He’s so exhausted it hurts. Everywhere. Muscles ache in the way that they do in the aftermath of a long stakeout before the climax of a hunt. His skull tightens and presses in, verges on migraine nausea. He knows that Sam and his Dad feel the same way. They’re pale and dark shadows bruise the hollowed sockets of their eyes. They look like the living dead.

“Just stop! Both of you. We can’t keep doing this. There’s something else going on here and the two of you are just feeding it with your goddamn stubbornness and anger. You think Sam’s like Mom, Dad? You’re wrong. He’s exactly like you.”

Neither of them responds. John straightens the chair and subsides heavily into it. Sam hangs his head in exhaustion, biting his bottom lip.

They need to sleep but the two single beds are a quandary nobody’s sure how to deal with. 

Sam is the first to give in. He collapses onto one of the beds, leaving Dean to be the one to lie down next to him and ignore the emotion that radiates from their dad. Dean’s body fits close to Sam’s in the bed’s narrow confines. It’s not a choice.

Dean dreams of Sam’s first real hunt.

Despite his brother’s newfound faith in the sharp edge of a knife, Dean can see how nervous Sam is. It’s a big step. They’ve told him often enough. Dean knows that Sam wishes they’d stop telling him. He knows that Sam thinks he’s ready. But he also knows that Sammy’s not like them, not like him and Dad. 

Something in their dad’s expression in that final moment as Sam cuts into flesh tells Dean that he knows it too. An expression of the most intense regret floods his face. It terrifies Dean to see his strong, brave father looking so naked and unguarded. For a moment, he feels unaccountably jealous of his little brother. Dean knows that his dad has never worn that expression for him. His dad notices him looking and shuts down his expression.

Standing in a puddle of blood, Dean remembers the night when Sam first found the journal and realized that the world was not what he thought it was. He remembers Sam trying to hold onto Dad the next time he left on a hunt. Like holding on tight enough can make loss impossible. 

Dean can’t remember ever having that one moment of realization. 

Afterwards they have pizza and root beer and laugh a lot. Dad’s proud and Dean’s proud and Sam wears a small half-smile all night. 

John is still sitting in the chair when Dean wakes up. The table is back in its previous position. Dean’s not sure whether his dad has slept. He looks a little better than he had before.

Dean untangles himself from Sam’s long limbs. He crosses the room and briefly lays his hand on his dad’s shoulder before sitting in the chair opposite him.

“Thought I could smell coffee for a moment there,” he says, aiming for a light tone. It comes out sounding juvenile. He drops his gaze and twists his bare toes in the carpet. 

“I don’t understand, Dean. I just don’t understand.” John looks across at Sam’s sleeping form. 

Dean feels as if something really important is riding on what he’s about to say. He knows that he has to speak truthfully and openly, and that he’ll only get one shot at this. His throat clenches and burns. He’s going to fuck this up. He can’t think up the magic words that will turn things around. If only it were as easy as clicking his fingers or heels together. 

“I--” It’s impossible. He can’t do it. There’s a greenish stain near his foot on the carpet, he stares at it fixedly.

When Dean looks up, John runs a tired hand across his forehead, pain marking the deeply-etched lines around his eyes and mouth. 

Dean knows that he needs to at least try. 

“I can’t remember everything. It’s like I’ve got these goddamn holes in my head. It’s this place, this room.” He sweeps his eyes across the faded wallpaper and dilapidated furniture. “But there are things that I know. Because…” he hesitates. John is looking at him intently. “Well…because they’re permanently imprinted on me. Like it’s in my bones. You know?” 

His father doesn’t nod but his expression is open and attentive. It gives Dean the confidence to continue. “I love him because he’s my brother, because he’s Sammy. But also because he’s Sam. Because I trust him and he makes me feel good. At first it wasn’t a choice, I couldn’t help myself, but then I chose it. So did he. Anything, anybody else is a second choice. That’s just the way it is, Dad.” 

John opens his mouth, resistance starting to make its way across his face, but then he stops, closes his mouth and stares at the grubby, brown carpet for what feels like an eternity. When he lifts his head, his expression has cleared, that darkness lingers on his face, but there’s something else in the way his father looks back at him. Dean doesn’t think it’s understanding but it might be acceptance.

“Things don’t work out the way we want or expect them to. It’s like that.” 

The sudden mechanical sound of gears settling into place behind the door is loud in the room. Dean quickly turns to see a round, metal knob push its way out of the door. He looks back at his dad, wide-eyed. “What the fuck?” 

John hangs his head again, smiles bitterly at the carpet and at something Dean doesn’t understand, lifts his head and says, “And on we go. Thank you, Dean. Thank you, son.” He gets heavily to his feet and starts to make his way towards the door.

“Dad!” 

John stops with his hand on the doorknob and turns back towards Dean. 

“Are we in hell? Or…” Where else could they be? He doesn’t know which questions to ask.

John hesitates before answering. “You ever have such an intense dream, Dean, that you thought it was real?”

It’s like his father has kicked up dust at the back of his memory. “Yeah.”

“That’s what this is.” 

Something doesn’t ring true in his father’s words. Dean quickly looks at Sam to make sure that his brother is still a solid, physical shape under the blanket. 

John hesitates after he’s twisted the doorknob, “Take care of your brother, Dean.” 

Again, Dean makes sure of the humps and hollows of his brother under the blanket before answering, “I always do, Dad.”

Dean waits to hear the sound of his father’s truck outside the motel room, strains himself in the hope of hearing it. His desperation makes no difference to the silence outside of the room. He can hear something else though. It’s the gentle, snuffled sound of sleepy breathing. 

He gets back into the warmth of the bed, fits his body behind Sam’s, his knees slotting into the crook of his brother’s, arm around his waist. Dean knows Sam is awake when he feels his brother tighten a hand on his arm. Sam lazily starts to push Dean’s hand lower down the hard planes of his stomach to his crotch.

Dean groans in his brother’s ear, before pulling his hand away. “We need to go, Sam.”

Sam stills. “Go where?”

Dean gets out of bed and Sam rolls over to look up at him. 

“We need to get out of this room.” He watches Sam’s glance flick to the door standing ajar behind him. Sam looks back at him, the unease apparent in his expression.

“We need to go, Sam.” 

Sam sucks in a deep breath and gets up. “Okay.”

Dean is lacing up his boots when Sam asks, “Where’s Dad?”

“Gone.”

They look at each other. Neither verbalizes how that makes them feel simultaneously bereft and guiltily relieved. 

They hesitate at the door, aware of being at the threshold of something irrevocable. Seconds trickle away slowly. Resigned to the inevitable, Dean abruptly pulls the door wide open.

They’re met by the opposite wall of a corridor. Dean’s first impression is that the wall has been papered with patchwork images from photographs, thousands of them, too small to make out precise details, but seemingly ordinary in their family-album depictions of people and places. He steps out into the corridor, somehow knowing what he’s going to see before he looks down the endless prolongation of the corridor. It stretches out into a haze in the distance. He looks the other way to see a mirror image. 

Sam steps out next to him, looks both ways and inexplicably snorts with laughter.

Dean looks at him, arching an eyebrow, “Have you always had such a fucked-up sense of humor? Wait, don’t answer that. I think I know the answer.”

Sam grins at him and asks, “Which way?”

Dean grimaces, looks left, then right, then left again, like a child learning to cross the road. “Does it matter?”

“Guess not,” Sam replies before turning left and starting to walk down the corridor. “Come on,” he says over his shoulder.

After a few minutes of silent walking, they come to the same inescapable conclusion.

Sam stops first. “We have to open another door. Go into another room.”

“Uh huh,” Dean agrees, a note of sarcasm in his voice at his brother’s statement of the obvious. He looks behind him. Each door they’ve walked past has been different, distinctive, and somehow familiar. The sepia-tinted images of the wallpaper are similarly familiar. He knew that he didn’t have to point that out to Sam as they walked pointlessly down the endless passageway. 

When he turns back, Sam is standing in front of a door a little ahead of him. “Might as well be this one.”

He walks up to Sam. They stand at the door like guests who’ve arrived too early for a dinner party and are not sure whether to wait in the car or ring the doorbell.

“You know what this is.”

“Yeah,” Sam replies quietly. “It’s home. The door to the house in Lawrence.”

“I’ve been here before.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asks, knowing that there’s some other meaning to Dean’s statement.

“Not when we were kids, or when…” he trails off, trying to remember a sense of some later, adult return to their childhood home. An image of a smiling woman, cloaked in bright flames, glows somewhere in the dark recesses of his broken memory. “It was like this,” he continues. “Not real. Like a dream or something.” 

He looks at Sam’s confused face and suddenly grins. “You were different. In fact, you were a bit of a dork. Even more than you are now,” he clarifies. “Seriously, Sammy, I’ve got a feeling that you have a lot to thank me for. I think I saved you from a life of complete dorkhood.”

Sam half-smiles but his voice is serious when he answers, “Yeah, I know that I have a lot to thank you for.” 

Dean turns away from the gravity of his brother’s tone to stare at the door. “Ready?” he asks. He has to turn his head to see his brother’s nod.

Still he hesitates, hand on the doorknob, uncertainty twisting his stomach in knots.

He feels the warmth of Sam’s hand, big and comforting, on his back. “It’s okay, Dean. You’re not doing this alone. I’m not going anywhere.”

Dean’s briefly reassured and holds onto that feeling. He ignores the image of a black door, blood seeping out from the gap beneath it, the sound of almost inhuman screaming muffled behind its solidity. He knows that Sam hadn’t seen it when they walked past. He doesn’t want to think about what that means. 

He smiles briefly at his brother, turns the doorknob and opens the door.


End file.
